Here's Looking at Cheever
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television HERE'S LOOKING AT CHEEVER BY MARVIN KITMAN October and November, public television presented dramatizations of three John Cheever stories about the emptiness of life in the suburbs...
...The shows were visually beautiful, too...
...He works in a bank in New York City and has just been refused his promotion, thereby forcing his wife to take a job at a boutique in town...
...Did I call my book The Gold Letter on a Scarlet Background...
...The characters don't exactly make you feel warm inside...
...As a result, the brass at WNET/13, which produced the shows, were in confusion and disarray...
...He tells it the way it is, and that's why his stories are important...
...The suspense was worthy of the old Inner Sanctum radio show...
...In the usual commercial mystery, when there is nothing exciting on the screen they candy it up: The canned music saws away mysteriously until the next killing...
...In terms of dramatic intensity, 200 years of the Adamses did not match one half-hour of The Addums Family...
...In fact, only the children are sympathetic: Mara Hobel in "The Sorrows of Gin" spilling out a quart of the elixir every night...
...The "Five Forty-Eight" (November 7) has no family in it...
...So what if nobody at the New York Times rushed out to build a statue of WNET President J. Iselin in Times Square...
...On the train home he thinks he is safe, but suddenly discovers her behind him...
...It's like trying to manufacture an airplane...
...For instance, Hawthorne himself might have asked, "Prithee kind sirs, why is the scarlet letter of television's Hester Prynne not scarlet...
...Commutes...
...But that's about all it had...
...Anyway, I think the naysayers and nitpickers should be ignored...
...A train rolled down the track, on its way to Shady Side station by way of Harlem...
...It's all very proper and cold and miserable in that house...
...How about Russell Baker in Washington or the maniacal H. Allen Smith in his putty-factory period in Texas...
...He is trying to recapture his youth by hurdling furniture in various homes around Connecticut...
...The usual...
...Public TV, after all, has specialized in making parties on the air, not programs...
...There is a Fort Knox of American literature out there, pure gold, that public TV can mine now that it has finally struck it rich with Cheever...
...I haven't been as encouraged by anything since the bad publicity Mobil Oil got back in the 1960s (which led to the invention of the Mobil grant of the 1970s...
...The dramatic tension in the story arises from the husband's fear of growing old...
...system is debilitating...
...It must remind him of his martini...
...How about an S. J. Perelman trilogy...
...WNET's first effort at combining great actors, great American stories, and great adapters produced excellent productions...
...The Cheever stories showed us the way the other people, the better kind, live...
...Well, I won't tell...
...The adaptations for the home screen were classy, thanks to Wendy Wasser-stein ("The Sorrows of Gin"), A. R. Gurney Jr...
...Television is poor preparation for literature on TV...
...Commercial networks, of course, do mysteries once or twice an hour, but these are rarely fraught with anything except screeching car tires and bongo drums...
...It's not the most cost-efficient way of doing business...
...The U.S...
...After the first plane conies off the assembly line, you dismantle the factory and throw it away...
...He says, "We've lost, haven't we...
...short, Three Cheever Stories was so good compared to (if one can bear to make the comparison) those commercial examinations of American life-california Fever, Love Bout, Three's Company-that the critics' complaints struck me as laughable...
...The most heavily criticized story was the first, "The Sorrows of Gin" (October 24...
...How about Art Buchwald's stories from his Brave Coward in Europe days, when he was at the peak of his power as a humorist...
...We have the problem of over-communication...
...They are not as rich as the first family...
...Eventually she corners him in a deserted suburban train station and...
...This infuriates him...
...Cheever does for the upper-middle-class wasp commuter type what Margaret Mead did for the Samoans in Coining of Age...
...After he dumps her, she begins following him around and he starts getting scared...
...Like most Cheever stories, it was about a family of upper-middle-class wasps...
...But what talk...
...Funny...
...Every party ends with the banker reliving his glory days on the track team-from living room to dining room and out the garden, once around the tool shed, and in through the pantry and over the stack of liquor store bills to the finish line...
...O Youth and Beauty") and Terrence McNally ("The Five Forty-Eight...
...His sport is drinking...
...1 believe it was President Lincoln who first said, "While you're up get me a Grant...
...The suspense grew in silence...
...The adults in Shady Side, by contrast, have trouble expressing their feelings...
...She (Signourey Weaver) plays tennis...
...The eight-year-old, for instance, asks Hermann what happens when you grow up...
...You stop looking out windows on planes," he says...
...In my house, everybody yells their feelings...
...The tone, let it be noted, is just waspy enough tor the nation's largest public TV station?whose idea of an ethnic is Dick Cavett, an immigrant from Yale...
...Clearly the sensibility at work here is considerably different than that at Universal Studios...
...Drinks...
...They had no confidence that they had wrought good television, damn good television, without the critics' stamp of approval...
...It was like having all the right ingredients for onion soup and suddenly, wild, onion soup...
...The naysayers were the same intellectuals who enjoyed that slambang, thrilling historical romance, The Adams Chronicles, a show with great lighting by two of the best lighting guys around...
...Even when the adapters go far beyond the original text, they still sound fresh and somewhat like Cheever...
...They can't afford new lacrosse shoes for their son and the liquor bill...
...They were the same critics who trumpeted The Scarlet Letter production, although there were many things wrong with that foundation-supported disaster which was four years in the making...
...The Cheever stories may not be up to the BBC standards employed by the TV literati...
...There was, for instance, no canned music or sound track...
...One has to set priorities...
...Don't close down the factory...
...He (Edward Hermann, known for his portrayal of FDR) commutes...
...They really booze it up in Cheever's world...
...Now I can understand why some critics found fault with Three Cheever Stories...
...Starring Lawrence Luckin-bill, an old commercial soap opera hero, this was one of the best mysteries ever on television...
...He (Michael Murphy) is Princeton '58...
...Their eight-year-old daughter (Mara Hobel) pours his gin into the sink every night...
...the two kids in "O Youth and Beauty" watching their parents disintegrating and betting on whether the marriage will last until Saturday afternoon...
...It's about an affair between a businessman and his secretary, who is slightly nuts...
...chi-chi critics nitpicked it to death...
...The mini-series received some remarkably faint praise...
...Instead you make lists of things to do on yellow paper...
...I suggest that the producers of Three Cheever Stories-Ann Blumenthal and Peter Weinberg-be given a second chance...
...As in a tapestry, each detail served a function...
...In between drinking, the parents push the kid through all sorts of activities (ballet, etc...
...to "finish" her...
...Psychological detail was piled upon psychological detail until the plot began boiling...
...Public TV makes one scries-hit or failure-And then everybody connected with it is fired...
...Track: hurdles...
...He calls his wife discreet and chilly, then says that's what he loves in a woman...
...But "Five Forty-Eight" was a true mystery...
...And listen to Michael Murphy?who gives a truly great performance as the ex-athlete trying to recapture his past-And Kathryn Walker finally breaking up...
...Some aspects of the "Five Forty-Fight" in particular should be studied by commercial TV producers...
...Mum-And Dud-ave tight lips that are kept tightly compressed...
...the other two are all talk...
...They were the same critics who relished Visions, a mixture of superb production and amateursville...
...Nobody has ever done Joe Heller's hilarious Calch-22 the way he wrote it...
...O Youth and Beauty" was filled with a lot of symbolism that I occasionally had trouble understanding, such as when Murphy's wife holds his dinner jacket while he gets on his mark...
...The complainers were the same critics who liked Theater in America, the greatest waste of $2 million since the invention of the grant...
...And the look was authentic, since all were filmed on location in Sharon, Massachusetts, Hartford, Connecticut and New York City...
...It makes you glad you speak English...
...This was possibly (lie only time some of the WNET/13 officials got to see the inner city...
...The family in the second story, "O Youth and Beauty," (October 31) is even grimmer...
...On Television HERE'S LOOKING AT CHEEVER BY MARVIN KITMAN October and November, public television presented dramatizations of three John Cheever stories about the emptiness of life in the suburbs (a condition matched only by the emptiness of life in the city...
...You could get a good buzz on just from watching these, the world's most pained disagreeable people, down their martinis after getting home to Shady Shide-hic-I mean, Shady Side, Connecticut...
...It's not his fault that these white Anglo-Saxon Protestants lead nice comfortable lives that are turning to ashes...
...I especially liked the opening shot in all three stories...
...It's very interesting in a pop-eyed sort of way...
...She is not supposed to say certain words like "polish off," as in "polishing off" eight martinis a night...
...That is the height of emotion, a frenzied passionate speech from a Cheever person...
...She (Kathryn Walker) keeps busy...
...The absence of music made it even creepier...
...Only the last story has any action...
...I could almost understand why they kept hitting the bottle, but after a while I thought to myself that if the father took another drink I would scream...
...But then again the BBC is willing to invest money in major dramatic programs more often than once every four years...
...Do they even know in public TV land that Heller was one of the creators of McHule's Navy...
Vol. 62 • December 1979 • No. 23
